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The militarised agenda being pursued by Western powers has resulted in the basic human rights of millions of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere being ignored in favour of a global agenda of expansion and greed. Shannonwatch urges everyone to question the morality of Ireland's support for wars of conquest in the upcoming Irish general election, to consider the negative impact of a pro-military agenda on Ireland's own sustainability, and to vote for election candidates that will work to restore Ireland's commitment to peace and human rights.

During George W. Bush's reign as U.S. president the CIA routinely used Shannon airport as they crisscrossed the world kidnapping and torturing. Bush has admitted that he personally authorised waterboarding, which is an act of torture and a crime under U.S. and international law. To date nothing has been done in the U.S. to investigate the circumstances in which torture was used by the Bush administration. Similarly nothing has been done in Ireland to investigate why and how Shannon was made available to the torture crews.

Slowly but surely the entire shameful truth is coming out about Shannon airport, CIA renditions, and the lengths the Irish government went to avoid the evidence. One of the first Dublin embassy cables from Wikileaks confirmed that the Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern knew about the CIA’s use of Shannon for its renditions. The latest Dublin cable (full text below) shows that they knew this meant they were in violation of torture conventions. Yet they did nothing to uphold their legal and moral responsibilities, preferring instead to avoid political difficulty.

According to a cable released by Wikileaks on 14 January, an unnamed individual who met with the U.S. embassy’s deputy chief of mission (DCM) in Dublin told the embassy

“were a plane to include Shannon in an itinerary that also included transporting prisoners, GOI [government of Ireland] lawyers might be forced to conclude that the GOI itself was in violation of torture conventions”.

Shannon airport has played a despicable role in the wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is continuing today, and the evidence was visible for all to see on Sunday 9th January as two US warplanes sat at the airport. One of these was a Hercules MC-130P 66-0216 special operations warplane. It is known as a Combat Shadow because of the subversive roles that it plays, not only in war zones, but also on so-called special operations in other countries. These operations are frequently denied by the U.S. Government.

This is not the MC-130P's first visit to Shannon. It refuelled here also in 2005 (see a photograph of the aircraft at Shannon on this jetphotos webpage) and probably multiple times in the meantime.

Margaret Mead, the U.S. anthropologist and author once said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” With that in mind, 11 people gathered at Shannon today to protest against the collusion of the airport and the Irish government in U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the airport is also known to have assisted the CIA crews taking kidnapped men and boys to Guantanamo Bay where they were systematically tortured, the group also remembered the men who died there as a result of this torture, and the 174 men still illegally detained in Guantanamo.

The December 2010 Shannonwatch logs show that the number of commercial aircraft carrying troops though Shannon Airport has remained steadily around the same numbers for the last three months. In the last month of the year 61 Omni Air International flights were recorded landed at the airport. Other commercial airlines such as World Airways and North American airlines regularly pass though Irish airspace carrying U.S. troops to and from Iraq and Afghanistan but only Omni Air lands to use the facilities at Shannon. An average of 5 to 6 troops flights per day used Irish airspace in December.